If you enjoy this content, if you find it meaningful to you, we encourage you to become a paid member for $3/mo! With a paid subscription, you get access to all of my FIVE published and award-winning books (digital and audiobook versions) and so, so much more! It may be a cup of coffee for you, but it is the nourishment that keeps up alive and makes conversations like these possible, and we are so very thankful!
“When you put the sacred masculine and feminine together, it’s humanity. Ceremonies allow us to embody these sacred notions. The sacred objects that are infused with so much symbolism and artistic beauty, a level of balance that has to be carefully articulated and crafted. It is a part of humanity to carry on this legacy.”
-Taylor Keen, Unshod: God is Red
Listen on Apple or Spotify (but come back here to converse about it all…)
Trigger warning—this conversation has the potential to make you mad. It also has the potential to wake you up. It carries great medicine, if you let it. If you are uninterested in such an affair, move on. If you are open and your heart is willing to see the many-selves dancing about, take a gander.
…
In this episode of God Is Red, we walk through Chapter 6 of Taylor’s book, Rediscovering Turtle Island. Taylor (Omaha / Cherokee) traces the thread from language migrations and the “overkill hypothesis” to Omaha corn medicine and the Calumet peace rite, asking how ceremony restores balance between sacred feminine and sacred masculine.
Learn more about Taylor’s work HERE.
Purchase Rediscovering Turtle Island HERE.
Learn more about Daniel’s work HERE.
Catch up on the God Is Red series!
An Unshod series of yarns with Omaha Storyteller, Taylor Keen exploring what it means to be truly human in the modern world.
Conversation Transcript
Daniel Firth Griffith: 0:02
Hello. Welcome to the podcast. We are back in the Goddess Red series with my dear friend and brother Taylor Keene in chapter six of his book Rediscovering Turtle Island: A First People’s Account of the Sacred Geography of America. We have been slowly uncurling and unpeeling so many deep and uh just very powerful thoughts as we’ve been uh studying these chapters page by page. Uh, with Taylor talked about the hook, the sacred animal lodge of the Pawnee and many plains peoples, the ideas of holy ground or holy hills, and uh really had a good reception from that episode. We continue in the same vein with chapter six, Mother Corn, Mother Earth, rediscovering a sacred tribal feminine tradition. Taylor in this episode talks about the balance of the sacred masculine and feminine, boast both in uh human society or culture in the tribe, if you will, and the cosmos with Morningstar and First Father Son and so much more. He talks about the power of ceremony and the power of remembering ceremony, even if you come from, like myself, cultures that have been destroyed by colonialism for literally thousands of years. I think most of our listeners, uh like again, like myself, come from such cultures where we’re only beginning now to really dream into the past, to pull up our ancestors, to look at them in the face and ask, what was our language, what was our cultural ceremonies, in which ways do we carry the sacred tradition of balance between the masculine and the feminine? It’s a great and wonderful episode. Taylor talks at length uh about the Omaha tradition of corn and the sacred pipe ceremony uh of peace after war or strife, um, and how that all comes together in the idea of reproduction. We also talk about the idea of the overkill overkill hypothesis, which is interesting how that weaves into it, uh, this cultural critique of indigenous peoples, um the overkill hypothesis and how it plays into the racial genocide, um, the racial othering, the separation, the settler colonialism, uh, but also just a very strange view of ancient man’s view or vision of this idea of balance between the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine. And so, with that, uh, without further ado, uh, thank you for being here, and let’s jump into the conversation with Taylor Keen.
How how help me understand like the spread though? Because so the Monacan and the Saponi that run the east side of the Appalachian Ridge, um, so they’re Siuian, but then a lot of the other peoples around us, so like the Powatan or the Senecamaka, they call them um, I mean, they speak Algonquin. Many other eastern tribes speak Algonquin, as you know. How how would the blackfeed speak an algonquin language? But isn’t the Lakota a Siuian language? It is. How does how does that work? Like, is what’s the similarities between Algonquin and Siuian language trees?
Taylor Keen: 3:41
I don’t know that there is much because there’s they’re whole separate language families.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 3:46
That’s that’s just incredible.
Taylor Keen: 3:49
But the um the other Algonquian plains tribes are Rappahos and Cheyennes and Crees, but the the fact that you see some of these Algonquin speakers out in the plains probably alludes to the fact that they had an east uh western migration.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 4:10
And so Sian people or Soyan speaking people in the East then had an eastern migration.
Taylor Keen: 4:17
Yeah, that one I can speak to because I did all the the research on that of when these language families split. Um I think it’s around 2,000 years ago that you saw a split between the eastern and the western Sian families. And uh I can’t remember which of the tribes that’s around you, but we figured out that one of them was one of those eastern Siuians.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 4:43
Yeah, the Monacan.
Taylor Keen: 4:44
The Monacans, yeah, because there was the Ofo and the Bilexi. They were also the but that that separation was very long time ago. And after that separation, then you see the Lokota, Nakota, Dakota split with the um Degihau Suyans and the Sheerware Suyans splitting after that. Wow. But it’s it’s uh certainly um because of the similarities in languages, uh it you know, there there’s an affinity um between all of the same uh tribal language family tribes. Wow.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 5:25
That’s really interesting to think about. Speaking of of which, did you did you get to look into that overkill hypothesis at all?
Taylor Keen: 5:32
Yeah.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 5:33
But that is what I get at every turn. Whenever I speak about whatever, um, if it has anything to do with an indigenous flavor, um, people are like, well, you know, the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, they eradicated the megafauna by overhunting because they didn’t understand sustainable hunting and sustainable harvesting practices. So, you know, are they really any better is what they always question. And and I obviously have an ecological response to that, which I mean, many anthropologists and archaeobotanists uh argue against the overkill hypothesis. It just doesn’t make any sense. Um, seems to have some racial origins, like we talked about a couple episodes ago with the uh um eugenics and skull-size um racist science that came out of the early 1800s. Um I think it’s an extension of that. But I wonder if you had any comment on it.
Taylor Keen: 6:33
Um I think it’s hogwash. I think this is all a part of the conversations we had about the founder’s dilemma of America. It’s it’s a mindset of uh guilty conscious that um deflects from its own responsibility, but it it’s also it’s a way to demonize uh the antiquity of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Um it’s all a part of the argument of well, they had their chance and they screwed it up, and so it’s our God-given right to take over and be in charge. Uh they’re not as idealist idealistic as uh some people say. And um I mean it it it it it becomes a fascination for so many. Um, I know that whenever I was preparing for uh Steve Rennella’s um conversation on meat eater, that was one of the first questions that uh I discussed with the executive uh producer. Because I was talking about I wanted to talk about rediscovering Turtle Island. And she said, you know, Steve has had a bunch of people uh on our podcast, but most of them, you know, it’s about Clovis First and basically she said the overkill hypothesis, and I was like, oh no. Um all of that comes from uh Paul Martin, and it was in the 1960s. Um that’s where they’re original, but there’s no great evidence other than some of the buffalo jumps. Um and we’re we’re not even sure how most of the bison were hunted and killed, um, except for at some of those sites. Um I believe the a much more plausible answer is what was happening at the end of the Pleistocene and the comet strike um that caused the younger Dryas. Um the planet was slowly warming, and then the comet strike um 14, 15,000 years ago caused everything to get really cold again. And some of those impacts uh around the world comet frag fragments hit you know, uh the glacial sheet, which at some points was a mile thick, but something hitting with that much kinetic energy and power, you know, it would have uh melted everything, put a bunch of debris up up into the atmosphere. And um, you know, it’s a similar thing. If and answering the questions the easiest is what killed the dinosaurs? Well, no nobody can test that. Nobody can test that.
unknown: 9:54
No.
Taylor Keen: 9:54
But if if a smaller version happened later on, that would explain what happened to the megafauna. If there is you know massive debris in the atmosphere and the sun can’t get through, nothing’s gonna live. And most of those uh megafauna animals or you know, all the big ones are vegetarian. So it’s it’s a convenient story. I mean, it’s starting to fade, at least in the academic perspectives, the overkill hypothesis. But I mean, I’m just like you. I every time I turn around, I run into it, and I just ugh. Yeah. And it’s it’s used as a weapon against the actions of indigenous people. So we were not good stewards. That’s the bottom line.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 10:46
Yeah. And and and maybe even an argument against the general occupation of earth by humanity, by some, that even the better among us, right? The indigenous among us, even they were not solvent enough to live sustainably on earth, that we’re an undesirable species. So either way it looks at it, to me, it’s just very ugly. I I think though, also Yeah, it’s yeah. Well, it it’s it’s ugly in in some part because of what it is, in another part, just because of how stupid and based the argument is. Like, for instance, like when you look at the bison, is a smaller derivative of their ancestors, right? So you had bison uh latifrons and bison antiquitous. And these two species of bison were much larger, much, much more sizable structures that would have lived during the same time as this end of the Pleistocene or, you know, right around the younger dryas as well. And then they obviously reduced their size when the grass has changed and the herbaceous material changed from C3 grasses to C4 grasses, that is to say, cool season grasses to warm season grasses. And we saw the diminution of size of many species, bison bising being being one of them. But like so many of the species that were eradicated at that time, I think, like you’re saying, due to the comment of the younger dryas or collision type event that happened during that period, but also just like how can a mammoth adapt fast enough and reduce its size fast enough to be able to survive on warm season grasses when for hundreds of thousands of years, cool season grasses were the only option. So, like, for instance, a cool season grass has high energy, low mineral or nutrient content, a warm season grass has high nutrient content, low energy. And so if you have a big body, the nutrients don’t matter as much as the energy, right? You need a high energy diet. But as soon as you see that transition happen at the end of the last glacial maximum, like you’re saying, then you have a comet catastrophe. But I think indigenous peoples are really easy to blame, right? Because we have cause, like we we’ve been talking about for the last two or three months. The causes manifest destiny, the cause is they’ve had their opportunity, the causes we don’t want to actually remember history, the cause is we don’t want to have the car hard conversations that you know, certain societies evolved in a certain way with civilization that was destroying and degenerative to Earth and Earth’s processes, whereas others maybe didn’t. And if that’s the case, then we have so much to learn. And if you don’t want to learn, then of course the overkill hypothesis, I think, makes a lot of sense. But it gets into also, so I I don’t bring this up out of nowhere for no reason, although I was curious on your on your point. But this this chapter, chapter six that we’re talking about today, Mother Corn, Mother Earth, it’s all about this idea of the sacred feminine being written into tribal ceremonies and earth and earth mother and the moon and things, which I’m just really excited to open the platform for you to discuss. Um, but there’s many times in this chapter that you bring up the idea that if this idea of the sacred feminine was symbolically and spiritually and socially, maybe so sh socioculturally in place, that we would have less wars and less conflict and less problems and things like this. And at the end of it, um, you even um call like a yearning you describe, but you call into being this idea that someday mother cur corn will return to the Omaha, the people who move against the headwaters, and it will be a long-awaited reunion. And so there’s a sense of yearning there for this idea of the sacred feminine and all the things that it contains. But the overkill hypothesis is based, as I understand it, implicitly in the indigenous or let’s say Native American misunderstanding of sexual reproduction, that because we don’t have science, that because you know they didn’t uh understand that when two come together, that there’s sperm and an egg, and the reproduction produces the specimen, and there’s a thing called gestation. Like these are all things that I’ve read, that because the indigenous peoples or the Native Americans didn’t understand what gestation was, or that the scientific validity of a sperm entering an egg would produce such a gestation, that they were able to harvest too much overkill, right? That’s the idea. Which is to me, though, an antithesis of the sacred feminine. Like you can’t have an entire culture built upon the acknowledgement and the ceremonial rights of the sacred feminine, while also not understand feminine processes such that moon governs, right? Cycles, reproduction, and things like this.
Taylor Keen: 15:21
Yeah, uh this was one of the first chapters I wrote of the book, so that may have been as long as almost 10 years ago. And it’s not that I’ve my mind. I think it’s just that my thinking has evolved a bit. Um not to be too cynical, but um I’ve had enough experiences in life to know that human beings, regardless of gender, can be wonderful and can be horrible. Um I I I don’t think that the answer of you know, um just more of the sacred feminine is important. Um I think they’re both important. Um in my nonprofit Sacred Seed, um, one of the notions that we’ve always tried to continue is some of the teachings that came uh from my elders in the Omaha tribe when I started Sacred Seed about reclaiming our indigenous agricultural life ways. My uh late mother who told me as I was getting ready to plant, I remember she said uh only uh women of childbearing age should plant the seeds. And that it just it seems apropos um I mean you’re you’re planting an egg basically and the seed, it’s got all the starch and energy that when it’s put into the ground after being very cold, then it sprouts and grows. And so for mothers to do that, and so the act of doing so now whenever I do our plantings, that’s what I ask. I just follow the teachings from from our tribe, and everyone seems to understand it. No one’s ever said this is weird or gross or anything else, where um the men are responsible for um getting the mounds and the beds ready the way that the women want them, and then they get out of the way and let the women plan. And it’s always been such a beautiful thing. I had a plot uh this year at one of the local community gardens here in Omaha. And um called City Sprouts, and they have a pretty large volunteer base and diverse, but uh I know there was uh his Hispanic families, Sudanese families. Um English, and people were translating for those who it’s not their first language, but everybody understood what to do, and it was just a beautiful thing. And I I I I do think that we need more of that in our world to understand. But it it also I because I don’t want to diminish the sacred masculine because I think it’s terribly m important for us uh men folk to realize that we are sacred vessels, just as women are sacred vessels and that there are things that we need to do um to embrace that um when to feel uh uh powerful and to be a protector, uh to be a good father to whatever that might mean to other men. But I I think it’s important that we all think about that. How is sacred masculine and and feminine in this world? And it needs to be a balance. Um I included in this chapter quite a bit of um information just to let your listeners know if they haven’t uh gone through rediscovering Turtle Island yet. Um this chapter was uh one, it was kind of a continuation of the philosophical, as you mentioned, that we need these this balance in the world. And I showed how it was represented in um some of the ancient earthen works, just whole notions of squares and circles, one is lunar, one is solar, and how that lines up and how those images are often together in a balance. I’m thinking of uh the Great Octagon and the Great Circle at the Newark works. Um and there’s multiple other examples. I’m trying to remember which one I yeah, I’ve got the High Banks work and Circleville, but they’re they’re all very similar. And one has archaeoastronomy aspects to the sun and then some to the moon. But and the other part was um she alluded to her mother, mother corn, um still trying to figure out how to get her home. Um but that story was one, it was it was pretty um such a powerful experience to have to um just become associated with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and then the Plains Indian Museum curator Becca West, um who’s now the CEO. But for her to let me know that there were some uncategorized objects in their collections that they didn’t know what it was, and go on this journey with with her to to uh find out what it was. It was one of the most powerful days of my life uh to realize uh what we had found, and what we had found was um arguably the last true Calumet um ceremonial set of objects ever with the Omaha’s that um disappeared around 1883. Um possibly in um Cahoots um with Alice Fletcher and maybe Francis uh LaFleche, who was uh one of the only major um tribal ethnologists who worked on his own tribe. But it’s such a difficult time. Uh, you know, we’ve discussed the impact of smallpox before, and the last wave was in 1860, but every time it hit, it was just devastating. You know, the cumulative effect of the whole thing was 85 to 95 percent of the indigenous peoples who were in um Nebraska at that point. Um that’s what weakened us. So by the time we get to the 1880s and the beginning of the reservation period, you know, we were very weak. And from everything I’ve ever heard within the tribe about that time frame was, you know, we had all these sacred objects, but we didn’t know how to take care of them anymore. And so whether or not that set, you know, mysteriously disappeared and ended up in the hands of a collector, or if somebody intentionally said, if you can keep these safe, keep them safe because I can’t keep them safe here anymore for whatever reasons. Um could have been influence of um Christian religions proselytizing, converting individuals. I know that some of the other tribes I heard the stories from uh the Omaha’s uh sister tribe, the Osage, and um they spoke of a time whenever um Peodaism came to them uh at the same time that um there was the rise of uh a lot of Catholic conversions within the Osage, and many of them still are both. Um and they told stories of um people bringing their ancient bundles and handing them to the new Peoty uh religious leaders and burning their old bundles. And uh what I found there was basically uh uh corn medicine bundle. And uh that nothing more embodies the physical manifestation of the spiritual being known as Mother Corn and the physical manifestation of uh those objects that were used in the ceremony for it. Um there might be some um overkill in the details of what I put into that chapter, but the purpose of the chapter, the purpose of the whole book is to help the seventh generation um whenever they’re ready. Uh this is much of what I could do as a how-to guide. Uh, no one’s ever really complained to me about some of those details at the end, but I was telling them basically this is how you write um uh a NAGPRA structure. You have to make an argument of why you think it’s yours. And that’s why I put it in there. To get to that level, you have to do this kind of research. Um, because whenever we found it, we knew that there was a cultural exchange of the Calumet ceremony between the Pawnees and the Omaha’s right around that time period, because it was documented by the ethnologist um Fletcher in the Flesh. And there were contradictory accounts of that, uh, especially by Alice Fletcher. Uh one hand saying she saw it and they had the mother corn object, and then when they published the ethnographic work, the Omaha Tribe in the early 1900s, she said that we had lost it. To me, it was a bit of a smoking gun of saying if you’re saying that we but you saw it before, then something’s not adding up here, and perhaps she was complicit in its quote disappearance, unquote. We don’t know any of that, but um even you know almost 150 years later, my point is that indigenous peoples can figure out all this stuff still. You can go back and those objects are still there. We treat those bundles uh like a person. And um every time I go back up there, which is typically twice a year, I make sure that I go visit her and tell her what’s going on with the tribe and how much we could use her influence. Um sadly, even though I’ve told you know the appropriate bodies up on the Omaha reservation about it, no one’s ever really made an attempt to try to bring her home. So unfortunately, I understand the old conundrum of maybe she’s safer there. Um she’s protected. Um I’m sure there’s other people within the tribe that feel the way that I do, that it’s so important and to understand these stories. Um but maybe um back to the hard lesson the monikans have uh learned that colonization, you know, it takes its toll on all of the old ways. Um and I’m I’m uh outspoken, you know, traditionalist when it comes to that. And we’re more concerned with powwows that with you know large prizes for contest categories are more important than doing the ceremony that we were supposed to be doing at that time. So I’m not a popular person in the tribe when it comes to that perspective. We should be going back to the basics and the roots of things. And uh all these, you know, the sacred masculine and the feminine were embodied in that. The Calamut ceremony itself is very powerful. Um I believe, uh, through my research that it was an extension of um ceremonies that occurred within the Cahokian Empire. Ultimately um there’s two um wands, I would call them pipe wands, because it’s built like a pipe, but there’s no physical aspect for a pipe to put in tobacco. It’s uh it’s a uh a duck’s bill at the end, and uh they’re adorned with a um eagle tail, one of them is bald and one of them is a golden, and one is represents the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine. People would see an image of a calamic wand, and would probably call it a peace pipe, and in essence it it was. Those two wands, there was an individual that knew how to perform all those. The name for the Omaha ceremony is uh wan wand, which means to sing for someone. The Pawnee’s version, the Hako, it means the wood that sings. So ultimately, uh these wands were carried between uh two feuding tribes that were at war. And it was the most powerful of all the ceremonies. So um if those uh Two leaders each carrying one, the sacred feminine being the more important one in this ceremony. Um be offered up into the feuding tribe. And if they didn’t kill the two and they accepted the gifts, it brought peace. And the ceremony that ensued ultimately um there is two um young wildcat hides um speckled and they would lay on the ground because the wands and especially mother corn were never to touch the earth. That’s what people in the tribe remembered. And at the center of the bundles, um surrounded by offerings, there was that huge bolt of beautiful. I I couldn’t identify if it was English or French broadcloth, but all these gifts that were a part of the gift giving uh to the tribe that we were previously at war with. And um ultimately they would uh take this ear of corn, which was uh put on a stick of fruit wood. Um that’s what the stands were for as well, to keep the wands from touching the ground uh or mother corn, which is just a beautiful ear of probably 150-year-old corn. And I see it twice a year. Um, it was adorned with uh um a blue earth paint, and um a circle around it and lines towards the four directions. I was careful in the book to not include images because it is something sacred. Uh some find that inappropriate. I do not. I think, I mean, you can find the any such image out on the internet, but um it’s um the object itself, the pinnacle of the ceremonies was they would uh attach the stick that mother corn is connected to. It’s just tied by um bison hair, which is woven into a small bit of rope, and uh then attached to a teepee pole and raised to the heavens to have the thunder spirits uh bless it, sanctify it, and then it would be returned, and ultimately uh in a ceremony that the Omaha’s called the turning of the child, um that anointed sacred ear of corn would be used to bless and sanctify uh younger members within the tribe. And as far as I can tell, it was a fertility ceremony because what’s the most important after a war? Fertility. Grow, repopulate the tribe. So as a symbolic ceremony, it’s just beautiful. Um and I and I think it’s important for people to know about such things and in the hopes that some someday um all people have some type of ceremonies like that, where you know, we’re in a um puritanical uh culture that goes back to Calvinistic perspective where we don’t talk about sex. We’ve talked about this before, too. Um but you know, it’s like you know, um it was demonized, you know, the mate pole and the phallic symbol. Right. Uh it doesn’t um have to make people feel uncomfortable. Hopefully they would hear these things and say, that’s beautiful. Something that could stop war and encourage fertility within the tribe again. That’s so important. And by not continuing to do those ceremonies, it puts us further and further away from what we once were. At least it’s tribal peoples, and in my opinion, for all human beings. And we’ve discussed this many times too, but I think it’s just a matter of how far back do you go till you find your tribal roots. You know, they’re a lot more clear in uh Irish and Scottish lines, but the dramatic tribes or tribal groups and it, you know, and we all had ceremonies and things to help us be better human beings. And that’s how I’d look at it.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 34:51
Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting conversation. I wanna I want to dive into a little bit more of the um the specifics in a minute, if you will allow it. But before that, just to touch on that last moment. My mother is Polish. There’s this uh story, uh Soons Devier Niva Nivizica, but it’s a story of Soons or Son, who is the son of Mokos, the mother of the moon. He gets in trouble, and the mother moon, which also represents water. Mokos is the uh really from the same derivative as moor or mir or bog or wetland, mokos, water, right? This ancient not river, not flowing river, like in in a lot of Irish mythology, a lot of Irish stories, that’s that’s the kaljuk, the the winter hag, the the river, the that’s flowing water. But in Polish or Eastern European mythology of mokos, the moors, the bogs, the wetlands. And that’s the that’s the mother of of of sun. And so you have that duality, that that balance. And I and I think it’s interesting because while I know what I just said, that’s all we know. We don’t have the ceremonies that go along with it. We have these really extended, really bastardized mythologies and tales, which are good enough. That’s what we have. We have to celebrate that. I don’t think we should spend our time mourning any more thousands of years of colonial history and Roman imperialism and things like this that eradicated our tribal natures and our tribal ceremonies. And yet at the same time, it is interesting that there is this great resurgence today, like in a lot of um Irish circles that I run into, Western European generally, you know, there’s a celebration of so many of these quote-unquote ceremonies or rites that are only a couple hundred years old. Like the autumn equinox is called Mabin, or Mabon, people say it differently. And uh it’s a celebration of the you know autumnal season, the closing down of the year as we say settle into what’s called Sawin, the birth of the year, the dark period where Kalyuck and the waters rain and the winter season and things. But like Mabin, from a linguistic perspective, has only been celebrated for a couple hundred years. It’s a very new ceremony. And in and I bring that up to say that it seems like ceremony and ceremony’s pool uh on its people back into this woven nature of Earth Mother or the land, um, is implicit to the human experience. That that that seems undeniable. I think you and I have talked at great lengths about this. Um, but the interesting thing about what you’re writing here in this chapter, to me, as I see it, is its relationship back to not a physical substance necessarily, but a living animate, nourishing substance like corn, right? So like you’re talking about this balance, and I’m you’re you’re the sacred seed guy. I’m I’m just uh to some degree an animal farmer. So I don’t understand the particulars, but isn’t corn as a plant both the male phallus and the feminine ovary, if I don’t know the word, egg structure, right? So like all those hairs that wave in the wind, it it doesn’t it have a bearing to that? I mean, like, isn’t it in some sense what we’re talking about, this balance between the sacred masculine and the feminine? But then also it’s healing, it’s nourishing, right? And I bring up the nourishing part because of the overkill hypothesis and things like this, where it seems like the essence of much indigenous culture and lifeways and traditions, ceremonies, whatever, um are based in the unbelievable respect and acknowledgement of the sacred balance from the sexual perspective, like the reproductive perspective.
Taylor Keen: 38:40
I think it’s beautiful what you brought up about corn being both. The scientific term always escapes me, but yes, you know, you’ve got uh the male parts and the corn tassels and um the pollen comes from that, and then you have the the silks for children, it’s fallopian tubes, and uh pollinated by the air, which is also poetic and beautiful. We probably discussed this before, but uh risk of repeating some things. But in the animal world, the most complex DNA is us, the humans. In the plant world, the most complex is corn. So I think that’s why we have a natural affinity for corn everywhere. Um the United States not even being 250 years old, um, it’s become such an iconic part of American culture. Uh in my state, this is the corn husker state. Um there’s just so much to learn just from the beauty. And what I ever always asked me, you know, what can I do to embrace the sacred masculine and feminine more? Grow a garden. It’s all there. Grow corn. Uh learn from it. The seeds are teachers. Uh, there’s some new blessings that I find all the time. You know, just what happens in these um micro ecosystems if you decide not to grow grass in your backyard and you turn it into a wonderful garden with lots of things. I just I remember um one of the years that I had a huge garden in my backyard. I I remember um one hot summer night coming back through, and uh I didn’t see it. This huge spider web, and uh uh I had a bad experience as a child, so I’m a little traumatized. In the indigenous perspectives, um, you know, all the spiders are manifestations of uh grandmother spider who was one of the forms of first woman, Mother Corn. She could turn into a spider. In the original uh Suyan Genesis story, after uh first first father descended to uh the lower realm and uh lost his life, it created a void between the upper realm and the lower realm. And after uh first father was resurrected, Mother Korn uh took on her stellar form uh as the great spider uh in the sky and um wove into existence uh the middle world here that human beings reside in now. So all of those stories elevate sacred masculine and and then feminine because in reality we need both. Anyone alive has a mother and a father, and uh as much as we can embrace those in our own ways, I I think it and to keep them in balance, that’s the important thing to me. Uh too much you hear the term a lot now, toxic masculinity. Uh but I’m sure there’s a form of toxic femininity as as well. And uh you want to avoid both and find a nice harmony where things feel natural for people.
Daniel Firth Griffith: 42:34
Can we talk about the uh the nature I uh uh you know, so when I was reading this morning preparing for today’s conversation, something that stuck out, and you’ve you’ve mentioned it twice, so maybe it’s called to be is this this this nature of post-a-war, two peoples coming together presenting the male and female pipes. So to I don’t know, I think there’s something there that I would like to draw out a little bit wider to extrude it a little bit further, that the nature of peace is in the balance of these two things. Now, when I say the two pipes, I mean that the on uh page 88, you write that the balance of the pipe wands had a uh a masculine side and a feminine side, and the feminine wand was adorned with the mature feathers of a female golden eagle, as you said, and the ashtem of the pipe was painted dark blue for the sky, which represented the masculine element, the father’s son. So, in as you write in many indigenous cultures, including your own, you have the father sun and the mother moon, and and and so the the blue being for the date, the sky, the sun, masculine. What what could be said about peace being the product culturally? Like I think spiritually, I think emotionally, you and I could agree very topically, meaning very quickly on the fact, but like socially, culturally, for a people living on a land over long periods of time, what would be the point of peace being derived from a male and female union, that balanced union, even if it’s in the ceremony of pipes, not necessarily the ceremony of physical intimacy between two actual people? But what would what would be the point of that? Like what’s the idea there?
Taylor Keen: 44:22
I’ve thought a lot about these things of late. Um ceremonies allow us to embody uh sacred notions and without you know the sacred objects that are infused with so much symbolism and artistic beauty. Uh that’s what I wanted people to take out of my description of those. It’s that that level of balance uh has to be uh uh carefully articulated and crafted. Every time I hold those objects and know that the little tufts are for the morning and the evening stars and the different colors, and um something I’ve learned um more recently in my research is that if you put the two wands together with the feathers uh pointed out, it’s the same symbol as um morning star. Um in academic writings about the Mississippian period and everything that I study, uh they refer to it as the bilobed arrow symbol, and you’ll see it um on headwear uh in some of the Mississippian artworks, you’ll see it on the twins. Um but it’s the symbol of Morningstar. And I just think that it it’s a part of humanity to carry on that legacy, and that’s what’s so important about those stories that I’m studying that I want the seventh generation to understand is that you know that symbol when viewed through the objects from a Calamut ceremony, they when you put the sacred masculine and the feminine together, it’s humanity. So to have those objects uh in a physical form to have such antiquity and and power, it’s uh knowing that knowledge, I think that that’s the central part of humanity at least for the Sioux, was the embodiment of those two things put together, which is the sacred masculine and the feminine. And it becomes a symbol of life and resurrection. To make a Christian analogy, I think that’s like the the the cross crucifix. Symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus, and in this case it’s the resurrection of first father, some of the stories, it’s morning star, his son also experienced the same thing. And even with the analogy of uh an arrow, um raised of the sun. Um working on now for uh finding the divine within. Um where um Evening Star, who was the oldest of uh first man and first woman’s children, um, she experienced uh an immaculate conception when she was uh impregnated by the rays of the sun. So just the notion of uh you find these commonalities the further back we go, death and resurrection, death and resurrection, ascension, uh immaculate conceptions. We’re not that different. That’s my point. And uh it’s only because of um doing all this research. I don’t know, it it it it gives me peace and balance in my own life to know that there are things out there that are healing and make us whole again, and the sacred masculine and the feminine is a part of that.
I enjoy the continued conversations. Thank you for sharing